LAS VEGAS, NV – The edge computing landscape is expanding and edge vendors are converging, leaving enterprises to deal with an increasingly diverse marketplace, Gartner Analyst Thomas Bittman said during the infrastructure and operations (I&O) cloud strategies conference.

"From every different angle, we're seeing vendors come at this thing, including quite a few startups," Bittman said. "Existing vendors from many different parts of the industry are taking their solutions and saying we can do something that fits the edge paradigm. We can attack that. We have something of value that can address part of that."

The current vendor landscape includes providers of data center services, content delivery network (CDN) edge services, edge analytics and machine learning (ML), edge communications infrastructure, edge management and orchestration, vertical industry edge solutions, edge data management, edge computing server solutions, and IoT platforms.

When enterprises choose vendors for the edge, they should think about the decision as choosing an ecosystem. "Don't just pick a vendor and go that route," Bittman warned.

Because if that vendor ecosystem has a weak link, like a partner who may not last long or a technology with major issues, the enterprise is in for a bumpy road. "Just be careful about that focus on the overall ecosystem," he said. And enterprises should be wary of "architecture that's too brittle," because "that's going to really stick you in a in a very small box," he added.

Successful enterprises will have to work closely with edge computing vendors, he added. There's "so much diversity out there. You need to make sure and align your requirements with their offering. Sometimes they're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. You need to make sure that you guys are speaking on the same wavelength here," Bittman advised.

He also recommends enterprises plan to be adaptable at the edge. "Almost every example I've seen of edge computing deployments has morphed over time. It has changed. It's grown." And adaptability is key to growing in tandem with the enterprise's edge requirements.

At the end of the day, enterprises need to prioritize the big picture. "The best way to approach this is to start a small use case at a time or an area at a time. Learn as you go, but you got to do it with a strategy in mind," Bittman said.